nobiscum

Latin

Etymology

From nōbīs "us" the ablative of nōs "we", + cum "with".

Two, not necessarily mutually exclusive explanations have been offered:

The first explanation was offered by Cicero, who believed that the normal word order of cum nōbīs "with us" would sound too much like cunnō bīs "twice in the cunt", so the words were reversed. This reversal was then applied to cum vōbīs, cum mē, cum tē, and cum sē.

A modern explanation is that the word ordering comes from the fact that in (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Proto-Indo-European the word *ḱóm (from which cum derives) was an adverb, not a preposition as it became in Latin. As such the *kom could appear before or after the object pronoun since it was the object of the verb, not the object of a preposition. As these special particles evolved into prepositions this word order became archaic even though it was still commonly used. Thus the contraction nōbīscum (and mēcum, etc.) evolved into an adverb in its own right.

Pronunciation

(Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /ˈnoː.biːs.kum/, [ˈnoːbiːs̠kʊ̃ˑ]

• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /ˈno.bis.kum/, [ˈnɔːbiskum]

Adverb

nōbīscum (not comparable)

1. with us

Descendants

• Emilian: nōsk
• Italian: nosco
• Old Galician-Portuguese: nosco
  • Portuguese: conosco, connosco (com + nosco)
• Spanish: connosco (con + nosco)

See also

• mēcum
• tēcum
• sēcum
• vōbīscum
• quōcum
• quācum
• quibuscum
• quīcum

References

• “nobiscum”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• nobiscum in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• nobiscum in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• Carl Meißner, Henry William Auden (1894) Latin Phrase-Book‎^[1], London: Macmillan and Co.
  • domestic animals: animalia quae nobiscum degunt (Plin. 8. 40)